Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Disclaimer: All numbers below are estimates. Some or all are
likely wrong. Please don’t get mad at me for using some estimate other than the
one you would have used. Feel free to do your own Fermi estimates, if you like.
I repeatedly disclose the fuzziness of my numbers below (as well as in the very
title of this post!), so please, dear reader, don’t think I’m trying to pull
one over on you.

220,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war, out
of a population of about 22 million. Assume that an average Syrian has about a
1% chance of dying from the civil war. This is huge. Americans find this kind
of risk intolerable. Most of us would flee from it, too, if we had the chance.

There are about 200,000 terrorists among the world’s 1
billion Muslims (and this is probably an inflated estimate). So a random person
from the Muslim world has about a 0.02% chance of being a terrorist. Assume (crudely)
that this is the proportion of Syrian refugees who are terrorists.

Using these estimates, if we let 10,000 Syrian refugees into
our country, we save 100 lives and let in 2 terrorists. Assuming (generously)
that each terrorist manages to kill on average one person once here, the
balance is still favorable to letting in refugees. There is a great deal of
room here for making the assumptions more conservative before you reach the
opposite conclusion. Let’s go ahead and increase the “chance of being a
terrorist” by a factor of 10; the resulting balance still favors letting the
refugees in. Presumably terrorists are trying extra-hard to sneak in; then
again, presumably we’re trying extra-hard to screen them out. Presumably those people
seeking asylum are at a *greater* risk than the average Syrian, so the above
estimate of “lives saved” is probably conservative. Also, we failed to account
for the benefit to those Syrians who wouldn’t have died anyway, but who still
escape daily terror and enjoy a vastly improved quality of life. (Quick quiz,
what’s the GDP per capita in Syria and what is it in the US? Wouldn’t it be
nice to increase your annual income by such a large factor overnight?) The
potential gains in quality-of-life are enormous.

Suppose you accept the estimates in the first sentence of
the previous paragraph. (I won’t call them “My estimates”, because I could just
as easily convince myself of some other set of estimates.) There’s one obvious
way to square the circle and reach the “ban all Syrian refugees” conclusion.
You might say, “Well, I value an American life at 50 times a Syrian life.” Some
people, explicitly or implicitly, take this position. That’s fine. I’m not
going to denounce you or spew venom at you for taking that position. (You need
to be part of the discussion, too!) But I do consider this radical discounting
of human life kind of ugly. I want that ugliness out in the open for everyone
to see. I don’t want it buried under hollow slogans. I don’t want it shrouded
in clever-but-imprecise rhetoric. By all means, value an American life more
than a Syrian life. But by a factor of 50? Something in the 1-4 range might be
reasonable, but at some point this differential starts to look monstrous. (Of
course, a different back-of-the-envelope estimate might reach a more modest
answer. Feel free to supply your own figures and assumptions.)

I think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit here. We can probably
select for those refugees who are almost certainly *not* terrorists.
Families with young children, old women, people who can be credibly vouched
for, etc. We can always be selective and exclude young single men or people
with questionable histories. And we can always use the refugees themselves as
intelligence assets. Who better to inform on ISIS terrorists than their former
neighbors? And how great would it be to lure a known ISIS terrorist to our country and promptly arrest him? Crude as it is, I think my “100 lives saved per 2 lives sacrificed” is
fairly conservative because we can do quite a lot to guard against the 2 lives
lost.